Ease of cleanup has absolutely no relationship the whether or not the pan will perform the cooking job better. I buy my pans based on how well they cook, not how easy they are to clean. Always buy high quality cookware suited to the task and buy for life. I've found properly seasoned cast iron to be superior for frying, deep frying, hearth cooking, searing meat, cooking cornbread, eggs and a number of other foods. Nothing sears better than cast iron. Cast iron's limitations are few but include reacting with highly acidic foods like tomato bases and lemons and accelerating the oxidative degradation of cooking oils at high temperature. This is remedied by using high quality enameled cast iron. Seasoned cast iron cookware gets better with time, unlike chemical non-stick coatings. For precise temperature control required in sauce making, candy making etc, stainless-lined solid copper cookware such as Falk Culinare is superior. Very few companies produce copper cookware worth buying - Falk is in my opinion the best and their bimetal process is actually used by the other major manufactures of quality copper cookware. Stoneware for baking is wonderful material and should be used more often. Same goes for clay cookery. It is always more important to have a wonderful, healthy meal than it is to save a few extra minutes doing dishes. Sleepyhollow

In regards to the service life of Cast iron, there are some cast iron soil pipes in Europe that were installed by the Romans in the 3rd or 4th century and they are still working fine. Before we begin the discussion of the why & how of your problem I want to caution you very carefully that repairing a cast iron vertical stack is not by any means a DIY project. You stack is made with cast iron "hub & spigot" pipe, which means the pipe is simply cut off straigth across the pipe on the discharge end, leaving was is known in the plumbing trade as a "Spigot" end. On the upstream or input end it has a broadened cup shape,called a "Hub", that a spigot end is set into then the hub is packed with oakum, which appears like frayed hemp rope that is impregnated with an oil material. After the oakum is packed in they poured about a 1/2" to 3/4" thick layer of molten lead in the hub to complete the seal. Hub & spigot CI pipe is extremely strong and generally it is capable of being self supporting when installed in a vertical stack however the codes do require additional supports at specified intervals as the stack rises. Generally as they attached horizontal branch lines to the stack they placed wooden blocking under the branch line close to the stack to provide the required support and in some cases they installed additional steel perf tape hangers. The problem here is that very often the steel perf tapes have long since rusted away and the stack is left supporting itself. The next problem is that as the structure settles over the years it the wooden bracing often looses contact with the pipe, which again leaves the stack self supporting and often as the house settles a long branch line settles until it is actually causing a leverage force against the stack. While CI is very strong it is also a brittle metal so as the forces of self supporting the weight plus any leverage forces are applied to the stack, the stack is rigid and in time the force on the vertical stack causes a section to crack vertically. The proper course of action is to cut out the damaged section and replace it. The section can be replaced with no-hub cI or PVC but you must be aware that when you cut the pipe in all likelihood there is no support on that pipe above the cut and you run an extremely high risk of the entire remainder of the stack to come crashing down on you. Do not take this lightly as CI pipe weighs approximately 10 pounds per linear foot and a stack from the basement to the roof in a two story house can easily weigh in at 400 to 500lbs. Just imagine an V-8 engine block poised and ready to fall when you cut the pipe. It really takes some serious measures to provide support to the stack before making the cut. I once saw a guy cutting a short section out in a basement and the moment he completed the cut, the entire stack fell straight down in a heartbeat. Fast enough that it hit his foot before he had a chance to move and he had 4 toes instantly cut off, not to mention that it also ripped horizontal branch lines all the way up the stack so they had to open all the walls and replace the line all the way up to the roof... This is one job that is best left to the pro's who have both the experience and the necessary equipment to support the stack while repairing it.

Thanks all. Eandhl, I did check out the Lodge and it looks terrific for a cast iron skillet. And the Anolon gets top reveiws from Cooks Illustrated for a nonstick aluminum. But I'm attracted to the Bridge Kitchenware because it isn't as heavy as the Lodge (I've been lugging the cast iron griddle that Viking sold as an accessory to my old viking rangetop for years...I'm getting too old, weak and tired to keep wrestling it.) And I like that it doesn't have the nonstick coating which every other alumninum one (including A-C and Anolon) have. I'm not sure I buy the stuff about the chemicals in the coatings being hazardous, but I KNOW my son will scratch it. Also I inherited an old cast aluminum dutch oven from my childhood and I know that it as a smooth and nonstick as a baby's bottom after 60 years of use, so I'm thinking the cast aluminum griddle might work out well too. Just wish I could find someone who actually had one to confirm....

Scratching, chipping, etc of smootop surfaces? Lots of prior discussions of this here including this one which, for anyone interested, has links to many other earlier postings on the subject. http://ths.gardenweb.com/discussions/2346300/causing-scratches-breakages-on-induction-cooktop >>>"the air between the pan and the glass can get very hot . . . accidents and burns when it escapes . . . cracking of the glass"<<< I don't mean the following as an attack on plllog. I, too, have seen some of the alarmist warnings that plllog describes where folks tell you what you are "supposed" to do or not do and what are the risks with induction. First, on the casting rings maybe causing problems with the pan-recognition sensors, that does not seem to be the case with skillets. Those rings are just not thick enough to elevate the pans enough to cause any problems. Where I've seen reports of problems has been with some cooktops and those reversible griddle-grill pans. (You know what I'm talking about -- the pans with smooth pancake griddle on one face and a ridged/rippled grill surface on the other?) Some brands of those reversible pans apparently had or have a very high lip on the "grill" side and the lip was high enough that when the griddle side was up (and the grill side was down) the lift was high enough to have confused the pan sensors on some induction cooktop a number of years ago. Last time I recall seeing a report of this problem was maybe four years ago. (Actually, IIRC, it might have been plllog who found that report.) Anyway, that grill-pan's lips were much taller than the casting rings on the skillets the OP was concerned about. Beyond that, I put the other kinds of warnings in the same category as other earnestly fearful but uninformed posts about induction. Fr'instance, I've seen any number of posters insisting that some European commission has determined that induction actually uses non-ionizing radiation to heat the foods and it is heating the food that heats the pans, destroys nutrients and adversely affects health. Other earnestly fearful posters have insisted that you must only use wooden spoons and such with induction because using steel utensils will somehow electrocute you. As for cracking, you obviously might crack a smoothtop by dropping a 7 quart, cast iron dutch oven full of water/soup/whatever several feet down onto any smoothtop ... well, you get the idea. The other stories about cracking surfaces actually originate in situations that have nothing to do with cast iron skillets, one about vacuum suction and the other about thermal shock. The "vaccum" suction theory might be be extrapolated from reports about folks pulling a large, hot, steamy domed pot lid off a pan, immediately plonking the lid rim-side down on the smooth surface. If the lid is large enough and the rim is perfectly straight, if there is enough steam trapped and the lid cools quickly enough, then a vacuum can develop. Large-enough lids apparently have produced sufficiently strong suction to have cracked a smoothop. There is just not enough room under any cast iron skillet for this to occur and it is unikely you could have enough liquid under it, either, without the burner shutting down and throwing an error code. The idea of cracking caused by "thermal shock" really has nothing to do with cast iron pans, either. Most of the reports that I have seen about thermal shock cracks have been with ultra-cheap portable induction cookers (PICs) that cut costs by using thin, tempered glass tops rather Schott "Ceran," the heavy duty glass-ceramic used on better PICs not to mention all smoothtop/induction ranges and cooktops. Ceran is designed to withstand thermal differentials of at least 750° F. Anybody heating pans that hot on induction has tampered with the control circuits & programming and is engaged in industrial metal smelting, not cooking. Other than that, Schott's products are mass produced and, like all mass produced products, there will be some tops with manufacturing defects that will break under use. That's a manufacturing problem, not a cast iron problem. As for superheated air burning cast iron users, again, there just is not enough air space under a cast iron pan and casting rings are never perfect enough for that to be a real problem, anyway.